Earlier this year, when Jack Back heard that there was to be a projected increase in Bitcoin worth, he decided to prepare. He began his hunt for the best Bitcoin miners money could employ, buying all of them equipment and a warehouse for them to use as their headquarters. However, he did manage to get a few things wrong. When they first began their operation, they had numerous blackouts due to there being only one outlet in the warehouse. The electricity bill was much more expensive than Back had anticipated, so they immediately began to lose money. Along with those bills, Back also made some investment mistakes.

“I spent 10,000 on mining equipment,” Back said. “Pickaxes, headlamps, some canaries. I thought we had to actually dig into the ground to get them.”

Despite his earlier difficulties, Back is now one of the wealthiest men on Earth. He owes it all to his warehouse full of nerds and computers.

Back isn’t an outlier. A special few of lucky people and entrepreneurs have managed to bypass the extreme cost of a Bitcoin and the high risk of the market to become wealthy. Many of these people started out on their journey not looking to get rich, but to answer one question: what even is a Bitcoin?

“I didn’t start this endeavour to get rich,” Back said. “I started it because no one could tell me what a Bitcoin was like. My dream was simple- the money equivalent of catching a cloud.”

Back first thought that Bitcoins were real coins, but were found in a special place- underneath the cushions of Bill Gates’ couch. When that theory was debunked, he thought perhaps a Bitcoin had to do with the dark arts, due to the name ‘cryptocurrency.’

“Just sounded like something to do with dead people,” Back said. “You know, with necromancy and necrophilia and all that.”

Back still has yet to find concrete evidence to support any of his suspicions. He claims that the workers in his warehouse have refused to show him the thing that now gives him such wealth. He has now spent several thousand dollars on research projects to find out what a Bitcoin is. Some of his teams hypothesis are as follows: it’s a coin people bite to make sure they’re real, they are the chocolate coins wrapped in gold paper that children eat, they are coins found in the popular Mario Bros. games, etc. Luke Puke, head researcher, has his own ideas about what a Bitcoin is.

“Bitcoins are intangible,” Puke said. “You literally cannot touch them.They were created as a completely digital currency. Don’t tell Mr. Back that, though. This is a really easy paycheck.”

Despite the abstract concept of a Bitcoin, there is one person who has perhaps gotten the closest to ‘touching’ one.

Mairy Dairy is a junker. She goes through junkyards, searching for reusable or sellable stuff. She often just goes for car parts, but one day, she went looking for hard drives. On one of the hard drives she took home, she found a million Bitcoins saved to the computer. It had probably been left by someone who owned a lot of them before they became worth anything. Dairy, with her harddrive, was now the fortieth wealthiest woman in the world. Today, she spends all of her time Bitcoining.

“I know it sounds risky,” Dairy said. “To invest so heavily in something that someone made up on the Internet and who no one monitors to make sure the market doesn’t blow up. But I promise, it’s even more risky than it sounds